(upbeat music) - Good evening.

Sometime ago we did a two-part series on the black child and discussed, among other topics, psychomotor development and the effects of racism on the black child.

This evening we return to the subject, in the interest of thoroughness, with Mr. Amos Wilson, author of "The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child."

Mr. Wilson, first this question, why a "psychology of the black child?"

- Because in a sentence we can say that psychologists that are currently available for dealing with black children do not really meet the needs of black children, nor black people as a whole.

Psychology, like many other disciplines, it's based upon the history and experience of a people.

The psychology that's available to black people, that is used for teaching black people, for a whole host of things that we use psychology for in this culture, is really European psychology, and is based upon the European experience.

And to try to transfer that psychology to black people, to try to explain the black psyche, in terms of a psychology that's not related to the history and experience of black people, is really to misuse that psychology and to mislead black people.

- [Listervelt] But aren't we all one people?

Aren't we?

- We are to a degree, but I often use a paradox when this kind of question is asked.

I say that we are different because we are so much alike.

All of us are alike in that we use learning as a means of coping with our environment.

And in that sense, black people learn as white people learn such.

So we are the same in that we use the instrument of learning as a coping tool.

However, what we learn is what makes our behaviors different.

So then we can say in the long run, in terms of the historical experience of black people, what have black people learned?

And looking at that learning experience, we must say then that their behavior is related to that experience.

And the thing we recognized immediately is that the black learning experience is not the European learning experience.

- [Listervelt] What do you mean there?

- And I sort of like to look at it in terms of, first, in terms of individual psychology.

For instance, if you did a psychological profile of me, that profile would have to look into my own personal experience, my own personal history.

You could not use that profile for yourself.

It would not fit you.

I could not explain your behavior in terms of my experience as such, because your behavior and your experience, of course, is unique.

Therefore the European experience is a unique experience.

The psychology of Europeans is based on that experience and consequently it cannot be used for our people.

We have to look in the history of African people for the psychology of African people, you see.

So then the psychology is, for instance, take educational psychology, to a great extent that psychology is built around the white middle class child.

But if you take that psychology and go into the majority of schools in our urban areas, you don't find the white middle class child there.

So you have a teacher, who perhaps has been educated in terms of that psychology, running into children or having to deal with a classroom of children, and the child she's been taught to deal with is not even in the classroom to begin with.

So of course this creates a great disparity in what she's learned, what she or he expects to go on in the classroom, and what actually occurs.

Which leads to a good deal of confusion.

The other aspect of why we need a black psychology, involves the fact that Eurocentric psychology is a part of the Eurocentric and European oppressive mechanism.

It is one of the major means by which the European has maintained his domination and subjugation of black people.

It is a psychology that has developed, to a great extent, out of the European colonial experience and still carries those roots.

And, as a matter of fact, even in this day and age, European psychology is used to manipulate black people, to maintain them in a position of subjugation and so forth.

So we have to develop a psychology, a black psychology, that must countermand and counteract this kind of influence of Eurocentric psychology.

- How is European psychology used to manipulate and dominate black people?

- There are any number of ways that it's used.

First of all, it's used to maintain an image of black people, both in Europeans themselves and of black people themselves, the so-called famous inferiority complex.

To a great extent Eurocentric psychology has been used to justify basic white prejudices.

So the average white person in the racist American society, thinks of blacks, let's say, as so-called innately inferior, say intellectually.

Along comes then their psychology, with the so-called sheen of being scientific, to justify what is already a common myth.

So to that extent, it supports a racist system that exists in the society.

As a matter of fact, not only does it do that, it provides various number of categories and labels that are used by the layman as well as by professionals to prevent black children in many ways from gaining positive things.

- What are these labels?

- Many of the labels, labels such as learning disabled, those labels that we hear a lot about nowadays, hyperactivity, reading disabilities, language deficiencies.

As a matter of fact to a great extent, when you are in a university or college and you go to a course that supposedly deals with the minority child, so-called, it really becomes, to a great extent, a course on labels.

Say, disadvantaged children, this kind of thing.

Culturally deprived children.

So what happens quite often, the teacher leaves that kind of course with a series of negative labels, so that when that teacher perhaps enters into a classroom, these labels are placed on the children, which lowers her expectation, or his expectation, about these children.

And provides a ready excuse for not teaching.

You see, in a sense, this labeling business has left the teacher free now to excuse himself or herself from really teaching, because you can need immediately make an excuse, well this child is not learning because it's from a disadvantaged neighborhood, or it's from a deprived culture, or they have a minimal brain damage, or it's hyperactive.

And therefore, why bother?

- I wanna go back to your book a little bit and we'll leave that and go to some other things.

But in your book you mentioned that many people make the mistake of looking at the black child as a white child that's painted black.

- Yeah.

- Would you expound on that some, please?

- Yes, that's a common mistake that we find.

And in fact it's sort of a myth that's used to justify a lot of so-called civil rights movements and integrationist movements.

And it's been sort of a convenient fiction.

However, sometimes it works against our own interest.

And that is of seeing the black child merely as a colored child, you know, just a white child except the fact that it has a little different color as such.

And underneath the color everything else is the same.

But I object to that, because color is not merely just a shade on the body.

What your color is, represents the history and experience of your people.

We are the color we are because of the long evolutionary experience of black people in Africa, as a result of black people adjusting to the African continent.

It relates also to the concept of genes.

You see, our color, of course, comes from our genes, but we cannot think of genes merely as little chemical packets that color your skin and color your hair and give your body shape and forms.

The genes are, in a way, a miniature abstraction of the history and experience of one's people.

The cultural experience, as well as the biological experience of one's people.

So then what color represents on the surface is really the history and experience of black people.

You see, so whatever biological decisions our people made, biological adjustments they made to the African continent and so forth, is represented in our bodies.

- [Listervelt] Mm, okay.

In our first series you talked about psychomotor development and the black child.

Would you briefly summarize this area?

- This again goes back to what I talk about as the African experience, the African evolutionary experience.

Sometimes we overlook some very basic ideas and one of the basic ideas revolves around oppression.

When you look at the European climate and the European vegetation and its climatic history, and then you compare that, say to the African climate history, the African geography and vegetational systems and so forth, you are faced with the issue then, why is it that the black body should be a duplicate of the European body?

When, if we look at it from a biological point of view, the nature seeks to adjust a body to its geographical surrounds.

And the geographical surrounds of the black man in Africa is quite significantly different from that of the European.

So in light of that, we should expect that that body, the African body, should not be a duplicate of the European body as such.

So consequently, in order to understand the African body, we must then look at the African evolutionary experience, as such.

When you look at it that way, then you begin to recognize that there are very significant differences in the the race of development of black, say, and European children.

For instance, many of the charts we use in this country and other countries are charts based upon the developmental rates and orientation of Europeans.

When we look at the African charts though, we see rates that are so significantly different, until, for instance, after a study of black American children by the American Academy of Pediatrics, it was found that their differences were such, that is the differences between the development of black children and white children, that a different nutritional chart and a different nutritional approach to black children should be used.

For instance, the black child does things on the very first day of birth, such as the ability to hold its head up.

If you would pull it up into a sitting position, it is able to actually hold its head up.

Black children able to do this, basically say nine hours after being born, or on the very first day.

The European child reaches this milestone a month and a half later.

Black children, for instance, can firmly move their heads about and deal with the environment, or maintain a social relationship with their caretaker, or with an examiner on the first two days after birth.

The European child takes about two months to reach this point.

There are things black children are doing at, say, seven weeks, that the European child reaches some 20 weeks later.

It even gets broader than that.

For instance, if a black child, at five months, can coordinate himself, so that he can say take a form out of a form board, it will take the European child some six months to get to that same milestone.

Or walking, say walking the stairs alone, a black child is doing that, many of them, at seven months, the European child then is going to take another three or four months sometimes to get to that same point.

As a matter of fact, some of the developmental scales that are used to measure children's rates of growth, include some 60 different items.

And on all 60 of those items, the black child comes out significantly ahead in psychomotor development.

And remember, I'm emphasizing psychomotor development here.

- Mm hm.

- Not just motor development.

We were also speaking in terms of those things that are mental as well.

So then it would indicate then both on a physical level, as far as the race of body growth and so forth, as well as on a psychological level, the black child is significantly in advance of it's European counterpart.

To add on another aspect of this, because sometimes the European psychologist concedes this growth and development of the black child and it's put under the caption of motoric advancement, or motoric superiority of the black child, as if it has nothing, or little to do with- - Is a good athlete.

- Yeah, right.

It has nothing to do with the mind.

But you know, now we are developing a different type of, so-called intelligence test, that doesn't deal with pencil and paper and is far less so-called culturally oriented.

We are now developing tests with the computers, wherein we can actually attach electrodes to the brain and challenge that child's vision, hearing, in response to things going on in the environment and get a read out of its brainwave activities, as to how it is processing that information.

How it is responding to those stimuli that are occurring in the environment.

And here we find, and it's interesting at this point to note that Jensen himself notes this in his famous (indistinct) that degraded black people to a good extent, that the brainwave patterns of black children shows a significant advance in terms of maturity over that of white children.

Which means then that even at birth, not only are they motorically in advance, but in terms of their ability to process information and handle information, they're also in advance.

And this is seen too in the earlier accomplishment in the language area, black children of course are talking earlier, as well as walking earlier, as well as established in what we call social relations earlier and so forth.

- Mm hm.

- So you see this somehow must be related to the African experience of people.

And you can see the tremendous damage that can be done if you use, for instance, the white middle class child as a model for measuring black children.

Or use what is adequate to meet their nutritional needs, as being adequate to meet the needs of black children.

And this is why that myth of the black child being a white child colored black becomes ultimately damaging to black children, because you're faced with the issue then, in a sense, in terms of the advancement of black children, using a standard of the European child, is it may not be possible that we may be retarding the growth and development of that child?

When we talk about the readiness of a child to learn and you look at the European child, may we not be missing out on the readiness of our own children because we are not looking at those children, in terms of their actual ancestry and background?

So there are many implications.

- And I guess all this ties back into the need for a psychology- - Definitely.

- Of the black child.

- Definitely.

And based on that black experience, because it becomes obvious, in terms of its physiological and psychological growth and development, you are not talking about the same children at all.

- I went to a college a couple of days ago and it just so happened that, and I'm serious about this, when I approached the desk, there was a developmental psychology book on that desk.

And I looked through that book.

And there was nothing on the black child.

And I'm talking about at a black institution.

Why is that?

Why does that exist?

- For a number of reasons.

One of the reasons, I think, and an overall reason, is that these psychologies, you see, just by the title of them, are called developmental psychology.

- [Listervelt] Mm hm.

- And that deceives many people into thinking then that this is a psychology that has equal applicability across board.

And unfortunately many black schools and black scholars operate under this illusion.

One of the things that we don't, as black people, I think we are not conscious enough of, is how white disciplines, not only psychology, but sociology, all are part and parcel, really a part of the process of maintaining the subjugation of black people.

And I don't think we are aware to the degree that we should be, that when we are engaged in standard American education, we are actually engaged in what are called European studies, or White studies.

We have a lot of people who went off, you know, in the sixties and we demanded black studies, as if we were demanding something ethnic.

As if what had been offered in America and what's being offered in American universities is non-ethnic and objective and across the board.

And therefore the European then doesn't call his courses the psychology of the white child, or the sociology from European perspective.

- And it's just psychology.

- Or white economics.

But this is exactly what it is.

And therefore, you have in many black schools, this idea that simply because it is not overtly labeled white or European, that it is not therefore white or European in origin.

And to a great extent, these psychologies are exactly what they should be, in a sense.

They are there to maintain the position of Europeans, as such.

The European, in a sense, protects his own interest by not really talking about the black child in any truthful light and presenting the black child in a different sort of light.

The ultimate outcome of studies, even in black schools ultimately, is to maintain the European in a superior position, as such.

- [Listervelt] What do you think would be gained if the black population, worldwide, were to become more knowledgeable about the black child's psychomotor development, et cetera?

What would you think the benefit would be?

- I think the benefit would be, and that would be not just a benefit, but the many benefits would be, first of all, turning over the world situation as it is today.

I think it's basically an insult to the intelligence and to the man and womanhood of black people, and I may say of non-white people, that we have a minority in the world that is dominating that world.

We ought to forget that the European is really a minority in the world.

It's not a majority.

We are so used to in this country, of thinking of ourselves as minorities, And we often forget that we are part of a very large majority in the world.

In fact, I heard someone project that the European segment of the world population would be something like 10%, in the 1990s.

At this point I think it's around 20% now, which means that we have then, from 10 to 20% of the world population literally ruling over and dominating the other 80%.

The other thing- - What's wrong with that?

- The other thing...

Yes.

- What's wrong with that?

- There are many things wrong with it.

A part of the thing is, of course, is the fact that we as non-white people supply these countries with the wealth that are under our lands.

And the amazing paradox is, in a sense, that the richer our lands are, our African lands, if you mentioned even the Asian ones, the South American one, the poorer, quite often the people are who are above them.

And then we have this image then of non-white people as being poor, as poverty stricken.

And you have the shame of people literally starving to death, while their soils supply the riches and wealth that maintains, essentially, a resource-less Europe.

So just the idea of enjoying more of our own wealth and the wealth of our land is enough to develop a psychology, not only a psychology, but really a whole host of disciplines, a sociology and economics, that will reverse this kind of situation, where the majority of the world's people that also own the actual majority of the world's natural wealth should benefit from that wealth as such.

The other thing is, of course, that we have assumed, unfortunately, that somehow what is European, represents normality.

Represents the way that the world should go.

And represents the only way of what we call development.

And unfortunately I don't think we've examined European psychology.

Paradoxically, European psychology is not contained in psychology books.

It's essentially contained in history.

And what do we see- - Say that again.

- The psychology of Europeans are essentially contained in history, not in psychology books.

Because it's a psychology that you see acted out on the world stage.

And what is the result of that psychology?

What is the result of the, say, dominant position of the European in the world?

It is bought at a tremendous cost to non-white people.

For instance, you can ask the question, is there any country where the European stepped that the local people were not degraded in some sort of way, that the local people were not exploited in some sort of way, that in many instances, such as this country, or in South America, where the local populations were not literally and physically destroyed, as such?

When we look at even...

So in the historical sense, you see, we are dealing here with a people in terms of their actions, to me, that are not commendable, in terms of what we should be seeking as a people.

I look into the future and I see the non-white people coming back on the world stage and ruling that world stage.

Taking that rightful place in the power relations of the world.

Will those non-white people be colored Europeans?

Will then they set up a world too, that depends upon the degradation of other people and upon the subjugation of other people?

Will they too establish a racist ideology?

Or will their world be a different one, based on a whole different set of principles?

- [Listervelt] Do you think it will be?

- It depends upon what choices we make as people.

It depends again upon looking at their psychology, understanding the results of their psychology, critically analyzing the European psyche, then looking at our own and making some very critical choices.

If for instance though we choose, as unfortunately has been chosen by many of our people, equality as our goal, this kind of thing that we want to be the same as the European.

We don't wanna be any different.

As a matter of fact, we wanna be so much alike, we don't even want people to notice our color.

They say we want to remove the color line and forget that we are black, or forget that we are Asian, or what have you.

Now, then I think about that, and say, well what is this world really like?

If we are on the brink now of world suicide, we are in a situation as I just mentioned, where a small percentage of the world lives fat and well off of a large majority of the world that lives in degradation and so forth.

Are we saying when we want to be the same as the European?

Are we saying in a sense then what we wanna do is just multiply what the European already has?

We want to share in.

And I think this is a crucial issue for, say, the Black American, when he makes that kind of statement.

Does it mean that we want to join IBM or the other companies, so that we can equally exploit Africans and equally exploit third world nations?

I don't think when we look at it, that we would choose sameness, or being just like them.

And I don't think once we look at the effects of the European ideologies and psychologies on non-white people, that we will choose those as being adequate for our future goal.

- Mm hm.

- In fact, I think the choice of equality with whites is a very low level goal for black people.

Because of course when we look at this world today, we are almost on the brink now, of where the white man is ready to destroy the whole of the earth, where he seems to be unable to restrain himself.

- Okay, we'll have to come back next week for part two.

Mr. Amos Wilson, thank you very much.

That's our program, please join us next week.

Good evening.

(upbeat music)